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The History of NLP
The history of Neuro-Linguistic Programming or NLP, dates back to the early 1970s. This concept first began with the joint efforts of researchers Richard Bandler and John Grinder, together with the help of anthropologist Gregory Bateson, at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Their research marked the beginning of human potential seminars in California which later developed into a lucrative industry. It was the ideas of Alfred Korzybski on human modeling that influenced Gregory Bateson to develop NLP. These were the researchers who laid the foundation of the concept of NLP.
After them, it was David Gordon, Leslie Cameron Bandler, Judith De Lozier and Robert Dilts who gave their share of contributions to NLP in the late 1970s. However, after publishing a book on Neuro-Linguistic Programming in the 1980s, Grinder and Bandler dropped from the development of NLP. This then led to the haphazard development of NLP by many others. There was no order and logic to the development of NLP at that time. It was only in the 1980s that John Grinder and Judith De Lozier merged to form a new type of NLP called the New Code of NLP, where the whole mind and body adopted a systematic start to NLP. It was from here that the mass marketing of products related to Neuro-Linguistic Programming was started in the 1980s. There were people practicing NLP while at the same time making changes, to develop their own versions of NLP for implementation. It was Michael Hall who projected NLP with a focus on meta states where the patient learns to step back to view themselves using a larger perspective.
Next in line was Tad James who developed a technique where clients were told to visualize and create the timeline of their own lives. On scrutiny of their timelines, they could make improvements to their respective lines. This was also the period when new contributors to NLP like Judith De Lozier and Connirae emerged in the limelight. So it can be seen that the development of NLP was basically a joint effort of many doctors and scientists and cannot be attributed to the credit of a single person. However, towards the end of the 1980s a negative report on NLP was presented by Sharpley, this marked a decrease in the field of NLP research.
However, in July 1996, John Grinder and other researchers were involved in a lawsuit filed by Bandler who claimed sole ownership of NLP and its rights to the term as a trademark. Retaliating to this, a practitioner from the UK, Tony Clarkson approached the UK High Court about revoking Bandler's right for NLP's trademark as NLP was considered to be a general phrase, and not intellectual property. This splitting up of NLP only led to it being spread as new methods, money making methods and marketability provided stronger reason than ethics. However, though the NLP community was splintered, Bandler and Grinder were attributed to being the co-founders of NLP, and the lawsuits that Bandler had placed against Grinder were settled in 2001.
A 20 day NLP practitioner certification program was started in 1978 which training therapists completed as an adjunction to their professional qualifications. The 1990s saw governments in the UK certifying NLP courses and providers in other countries as a certified course. Today, NLP is accredited in Australia to the Australian Qualifications Framework. To date, Neuro-Linguistic Programming is widely accepted as a science where there is no best practice in it. Different authors, trainers and NLP practitioners have got their own methods, labels and concepts in NLP. Different countries have different training standards where there is change in quality. Europe follows European therapy standards to promote NLP training where the training varies between a few days for hobbyists and 35 days to ten months to become a professional in NLP.
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